7 Ways to Dramatically Boost the Number of Page Views on Your WordPress Site
A lot of internet marketers and webmasters will tell you that site analytics is overrated. While this may be true considering most webmasters starting out spend every waking moment refreshing their analytics program to find out if they have received a new visitor, stats should be given some thought. One statistics which is particularly important is the number of page views you receive, typically your page views in relation to the number of total unique visitors you receive. This is expressed by a separate statistic known as the bounce rate however some analytics program does not provide information on bounce rate.
The number of pages viewed per unique visitor or your bounce rate can tell a lot about your visitors. A high bounce rate or lower number of hits per visit typically means that you are offering low quality content. It could also mean that there is something about the design of your site (perhaps the ad placement or choice of colors) is off-putting to the visitor. The bounce rate is an important metric if you are looking for advertisers as advertisers use this statistic to judge the quality of your visitors. If you run a WordPress blog, there are numerous plugins that can be installed to boost the number of hits to your site.
This is a fairly common plugin used in most websites. It is also virtually mandatory if you offer frequent content on a blog that you are serious about. If you haven’t installed a related posts plugin yet, it is highly recommended that you do this as soon as possible. There is no shortage of related posts plugins on WordPress. There are literally dozens of options to choose from that display related posts based on a number of factors such as tags, title and meta keywords. Most plugins are quite decent in retrieving posts that are perfectly relevant but be sure to experiment and find a plugin that you find most “intelligent”.
New readers as well as recurring, long term readers tend to look for highlights when landing on a website. If a reader finds your site from a search engine for example, apart from perusing the related posts, the first section they would look at would be the popular posts. Considering they are the most frequently viewed on the website, there is a good chance that any site visitor would find these content interesting. Having a popular posts section could effectively boost the number of page views on your site as well as create a set of posts that can be used to drive the rest of the site.
- Categories and Tags
While this is usually included in any WordPress site by default, the importance of displaying categories and tags on your website cannot be emphasized enough. Having categories and tags improves accessibility, and improves accessibility leads to more pages visited by your readers. The Categories section is a common place that readers choose to use when deciding to browse the content of your site. You can further provide the option of displaying sub categories to improve accessibility and to cater to highly specific interests of individuals. Displaying sub categories can be done using special plugins of course. Using and displaying tags in the form of a tag cloud or ordered list servers the same purpose of having sub categories, to help readers find content easier.
- Images
Using images is a proven method to capture the attention of a reader. We are not referring to images in posts here, we are talking about themes that have images wherever posts are listed or displayed on the website. Having an image in the form of a thumbnail or “featured image” to represent a post can instantly boost the chances of readers clicking on a post. While the key to entice users into reading a a post is an attention-grabbing title, sometimes the title alone doesn’t cut it. interestingly, having an image that appears to be unrelated to the post but has peaked the curiosity of the reader will result in an additional page view. Magazine or news style themes and other high quality, premium themes usually provide this feature.
This is a lesser known and used technique to improve page views. The main reason with using random posts is because it is hit or miss, sometimes the user might find something of interest which leads to increased page views but in some scenarios nothing of interest will appear. Random Posts plugins may be either a plugin that displays a list in the sidebar or after a post or it may also be a large, prominent button with a caption such as “view a random article”. Both methods have its pros and cons however one type of plugin may be more effective than the other depending on the type of website.
- Divide Posts into Multiple Pages
This is commonly found in high profile websites and “online magazines”. Content is divided into numerous pages based on the sub topic that the article focuses on. While this is assuredly an effective way to skyrocket your page views, it can be an annoyance to the reader as he or she will have to switch back and forth between pages to view different parts of the article. There are several tutorials explaining how this can be done. One of them can be found here.
- Great Content
This tip is probably over used but it cannot be emphasized enough. Despite the numerous techniques that can be incorporated to boost page views or other statistics, having great, compelling content will leave readers with no choice but to come back for more and to explore all areas of the site which will in turn leave you with a healthy bounce rate.
As a final word of advice, write accurate titles and steer clear of deceptive method to gain unique hits when writing posts. If a visitor reaches your website expecting something but finds something else, they will hit the back button and exit the site as soon as they can which will drastically affect the number of page views per visitor.
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